How to Fly

Fact: Taido uses lots of jumps. If you want to be able to take full advan­tage of Taido’s unshin, tengi, and ungi, you will need to have plenty of jump­ing skill at your dis­posal. This arti­cle is about build­ing these skills.

Before I get into my rec­om­men­da­tions for improv­ing your jump, I want to make a brief dis­claimer (which has noth­ing to do with the gen­eral dis­claimers for this site as a whole): my jump isn’t great. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not bad either. I can jump over most mid-level kicks and do high back flips. I can launch into the air and spend a moment observ­ing before I decide whether I’d like to spin, kick, or some­thing else. My jump is respectable; it’s just not great.

And that’s my num­ber one qual­i­fi­ca­tion to be mak­ing the fol­low­ing rec­om­men­da­tions — I can’t yet jump the way I want to, and this means that I have to work at it. I have to try things out and specif­i­cally prac­tice to improve my jump­ing skills. I have read books and arti­cles on the sub­ject look­ing for sci­en­tific train­ing pro­to­cols and time-tested drills. I have exper­i­mented with a lot of dif­fer­ent meth­ods, and I have some ideas about what is nec­es­sary for increases in jump height and control.

What fol­lows are some gen­eral pro­gram­ming rec­om­men­da­tions for improv­ing your over­all jump­ing skills. You will have to make your own deci­sions about how to plug these into what­ever train­ing you already do, as plan­ning train­ing cycles is well beyond the scope of this article.

The most impor­tant thing to remem­ber is that jump­ing is a high-stress move­ment. You are work­ing in oppo­si­tion to grav­ity, so you will have to expend a lot of energy. You have to develop explo­sive strength and speed over your entire body. Jump work will wear you out and require ample recov­ery. Don’t overdo it, or you may have to deal with injuries. Try inte­grat­ing these meth­ods into your cur­rent train­ing grad­u­ally and pay atten­tion to feed­back from your body.

Testing

Before start­ing on any new kind of train­ing, it’s gen­er­ally a good idea to estab­lish a base­line and set test­ing stan­dards so you can mea­sure your progress (or lack thereof). Warm up and mea­sure your best out of three attempts at the fol­low­ing jumps: stand­ing ver­ti­cal, stand­ing hor­i­zon­tal, step­ping ver­ti­cal, step­ping hor­i­zon­tal, any spe­cific jump you wish to improve. This is not going to be sci­en­tific, so just make sure you have an idea where you stand so that you can com­pare later on.

From the Ground, Up

We’re going to work our jump­ing skills from the ground, upward, begin­ning with gen­eral mobility/flexibility and then build­ing strength and speed from the feet to the head. Jumping requires whole-body coor­di­na­tion, so it’ll be nec­es­sary to cover as many bases as pos­si­ble in our train­ing reg­i­men. We start with our feet.

Toe Crunches

Most peo­ple in amer­ica don’t spend a lot of time bare­foot. We wear shoes that restrict our nat­ural range of motion, retard our abil­ity to absorb and retrans­late impact with the ground, and reduce our ner­vous sen­si­tiv­ity. In order to coun­ter­act our daily depen­dence on mod­ern footwear, we should spend as much time as pos­si­ble each day bare­foot. This may be uncom­fort­able at first, but it will do as much for your jumps as all the depth jumps you can force your­self to do.

Just take off your shoes and walk around a bit. Pay atten­tion to the feel­ing of the floor or ground under your feet. Experiment with walk­ing and turn­ing on dif­fer­ent parts of the foot. Spread your toes. Then, squeeze them towards your heels, as if you could make fists with your feet. Relax and do it again. Do a few rep­e­ti­tions of this exer­cise any­time dur­ing the day you have a chance. It works best on thick grass or car­pet, but play­ing with a vari­ety of sur­faces will give you a lot of ner­vous stim­u­la­tion that will improve your body’s abil­ity to use the infor­ma­tion it receives through your feet.

Ankle Circles

After the toes, we need to work on our ankles. The basic ankle exer­cise is to lift one foot and turn it through the entire range of the ankle’s motion in wide cir­cles, mak­ing sure to work in both direc­tions. If you can do this while bal­anced on the oppo­site leg, it will be all the bet­ter for your jumps because bal­ance (the abil­ity to inter­pret and make cor­rec­tions based on the infor­ma­tion gath­ered by the eyes and inner ears) is vital for aer­ial control.

When you can do lots of wide cir­cles in both direc­tions, you can move on to alpha­bet shapes. “Write” each let­ter in the air with each foot, try­ing to keep your leg as still as pos­si­ble. This will improve your coor­di­na­tion and strengthen your ankles considerably.

Next, work on strength­en­ing and stretch­ing the calves by doing toe raises. Try alter­nat­ing five fast and five slow toe raises, mov­ing from a fully relaxed and stretched bot­tom posi­tion up to a fully tensed and locked-out top.

There is plenty more we could do for our lower legs, but let’s hold off on actu­ally jump­ing until we have a chance to build a strength/mobility plat­form in the rest of our legs and hips.

Dynamic Swing Stretching

Commonly known as swing kicks, this kind of stretch­ing con­di­tions the ner­vous sys­tem to relax resid­ual ten­sion in the mus­cles being “stretched.” However, rather than actu­ally elon­gat­ing the mus­cle fibers, we are actu­ally reduc­ing the “brak­ing” mech­a­nism that pro­tects us from rip­ping our limbs off when we move. Our bod­ies allow stronger mus­cles to relax more thor­oughly, so don’t worry about reduc­ing that reflex — you will be fine.

You should be doing these early on in every work­out any­way (after you are warm, before you are tired), but any­one seri­ous about jump prac­tice needs to do dynamic leg stretches in all direc­tions everyday.

Start from a shal­low range of motion and grad­u­ally build up to full range over the course of five to ten rep­e­ti­tions. Then switch legs. Do sev­eral sets back and forth until the full range of motion is achieved eas­ily. Practice swings with the leg slightly bent and fully extended. Make sure to hit every direc­tion: to the front, to the back, to the side with toes up, to the side with toes down, around clock­wise in front, around coun­ter­clock­wise in front, around clock­wise to the side, around coun­ter­clock­wise to the side.

This sounds like a lot of leg swing­ing every­day, and it is, but the pay­off is well worth it. Your dynamic flex­i­bil­ity will have dra­matic effects on your jump­ing abil­ity, and neglect­ing any range of motion will set you up for injury. So plug these into your daily rou­tine wher­ever you can, but don’t neglect to do them everyday.

Isometric Stretching

Isometric stretch­ing is stretch­ing a mus­cle under ten­sion (that’s not tech­ni­cally accu­rate, but it’s a good enough def­i­n­i­tion for our pur­poses here). These stretches don’t require much motion, if any. They work on relax­ing the “stretched” mus­cles by a ner­vous reflex that loosens the antag­o­nist of a con­tract­ing mus­cle. It’s not impor­tant for you to under­stand the ner­vous mech­a­nism at work — just do the exer­cises prop­erly and you will see improve­ments in strength and mobil­ity. Plug these stretches in dur­ing your cool-down.

Seiza Back Bend
This is my favorite leg stretch by far. I think it is used in yoga, but I have no idea what it is called, so I’ve always ref­ered to it as the seiza back bend, since that’s what it does. It’s great for the quadri­ceps and hip flex­ors because it strength­ens and stretches at the same time.

Begin sit­ting in seiza with your back straight. Lift your hips form your heels and push them for­ward. At the same time, inhale and lean back­wards, relax­ing your spine and look­ing for the floor behind you. Stop short of los­ing your bal­ance, but try to lean as far as pos­si­ble while still push­ing the hips for­ward. Hold this posi­tion for a few sec­onds while alter­nately con­tract­ing and relax­ing your thigh mus­cles a few times. Then, exhale from your abdomen and pull your­self back for­ward. Repeat sev­eral times.

Doing this stretch a few times daily will add an inch to your jump in short order, guar­an­teed. It will also help to increase mobil­ity in your tho­r­atic spine.

Eji Stretch
This is another great thigh/flexor stretch, but it works each leg sep­a­rately. Begin in eji­dachi, with your knee on the ground. Shift your weight slightly for­ward, so that you can lift your rear foot by bend­ing at the knee. Grab the foot with the oppo­site hand. While steady­ing your­self with your free hand on the floor, lean for­ward and push your hips toward to ground. At the same time, attempt to straighten the back leg against the hand that holds it. Push and relax sev­eral times before return­ing to the orig­i­nal position.

This stretch will allow you to seri­ously increase the flex­i­bil­ity of your psoas, or hip flex­ors. Since these mus­cles don’t get elon­gated too often in every­day walking-around, they tend to be very tight in cul­tures where the peo­ple spend a lot time sit­ting in chairs. Since the hip flex­ors are the antag­o­nist for the hip exten­sors (which are the prime movers for jump­ing), we need them to be espe­cially capa­ble of relax­ing in demand. This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant stretch for improv­ing your raw jump power because it allows you to get the most out of your pos­te­rior chain strength.

Fudodachi Squeeze / Side Leg Stretch
It is not enough to work each leg in a forward/backward direc­tion only. We have to address adduc­tion and abduc­tion strength and flex­i­bil­ity if we hope to use our jumps in three dimen­sions. For most peo­ple, the weak­est link when it comes to leg strength is the inner thigh. This is why we so often hear of groin pulls and and are so impressed by peo­ple who can do splits.

Splits actu­ally have very lit­tle to do with the length of the mus­cle fibers. The cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem has a mech­a­nism that inhibits any move­ment away from the cen­ter in two direc­tions at once. Spreading the legs as in a a split goes against the body’s hard­wired reflexes. However, since we know that the ner­vous sys­tem will allow more relax­ation (and thus, more mobil­ity) in stronger mus­cles, we can improve our out­ward leg mobil­ity by build­ing our inward strength.

To build strength and mobil­ity in the inner thighs, I use a com­bi­na­tion of a squeeze and stretch. First, stand in fudo­dachi and bend the knees to a com­fort­able height. Being care­ful not to put too much stress on the knees (eg. Stop if you feel pain), grip the floor with your feet and squeeze your inner thighs as if you are pulling your legs together. Hold the ten­sion for a few sec­onds, then release for sev­eral rep­e­ti­tions. Practice this stretch at var­i­ous depths.

After you have done that, it’s a good time to do some relaxed stretch­ing of the inner thigh mus­cles as well. Keeping your legs apart side­ways, bend one knee while straight­en­ing the other until you feel a stretch in the out­stretched leg. I think every­one knows this stretch. Remember to keep the bot­tom foot flat on the floor and the toes of the straight leg point­ing up. Do both sides.

And that’s all the ded­i­cated flex­i­bil­ity work we really need to do for jump­ing right now, though later i’ll write a few words on the impor­tance of upper body mobil­ity as well. Just remem­ber, mobil­ity is going to be every bit as impor­tant to your jump skills as leg strength. Before we move on to strength train­ing, there is one more foun­da­tion drill I want to men­tion — the four cor­ner bal­ance drill.

4CBD

Check this link and start prac­tic­ing the basic ver­sion of this drill today. As the arti­cle says, this will improve your bal­ance and leg strength. Since it’s uni­lat­eral, it also works on all the sta­bi­liz­ers, includ­ing the abduc­tion and adduc­tion men­tioned above. I love this drill. Do it a few times each day, and watch amaz­ing things hap­pen to your over­all coor­di­na­tion and agility. Your jumps will get higher and more con­trolled. Let’s not even get into the ben­e­fits to your kicking…

Basics! Basics!

Most peo­ple who are try­ing to improve their jumps go straight to the squats and depth jumps with­out build­ing a foun­da­tion. Doing so will get you injured. These high-power strength exer­cises take a toll on the body, and if you don’t have the mobil­ity to per­form then safely, you will develop dan­ger­ous strength imbal­ances that will lead to var­i­ous injuries, such as the chronic ail­ments that many train­ing vet­er­ans are always talk­ing about — phan­tom aches, stiff backs, shoul­der impinge­ments, etc. More often than not, these injuries are not caused by acute trauma, but by con­sis­tently unbal­anced train­ing that ignores mobil­ity in favor of power.

Make a point to include in your jump work exer­cises that will ensure the sus­tain­abil­ity of your pro­gram. Balance, flex­i­bil­ity, and range of motion are good things to have any­way, so don’t slack on the foun­da­tional exer­cises. I am not exag­ger­at­ing when I say that the above exer­cises will give you a great deal more mileage in your pro­gram than all the pop­u­lar ply­o­met­ric drills in the world. That said, hav­ing this foun­da­tion will allow you to get the most out of ply­o­met­ric train­ing per­formed later on.

So now, let’s look at ways to build strength and speed for jumping.

Sprints

Sprints are one of the best exer­cises for jumps that most peo­ple never think of. What do run­ning fast and jump­ing high have in com­mon? Plenty. Just look at the Olympic track and field ath­letes — often a sin­gle player will par­tic­i­pate in many events. Jumps and sprints are both power move­ments, and ath­letes who have a great time in the 40 meter tend to also have astound­ing ver­ti­cal leaps.

I rec­om­mend prac­tic­ing three kinds of sprints in short (about 10 to 20 meters) dis­tances for jump­ing. First, just run a fast as pos­si­ble in a straight line. You know, sprint. Rest a minute and sprint back. Repeat sev­eral times and call it a day. Don’t overdo sprints because they can wear you out really quickly. Remember, we’re doing them as a strength exer­cise here — not for car­dio. Just do a few each prac­tice, focussing on putting max­i­mum power into each stride.

After you have got­ten the hang of sprint­ing you can work on hill sprints. First, we go uphill. This will build mus­cle in your legs by work­ing against grav­ity. It will help build speed by push­ing explo­sively against the ground. Behind Negishi Sensei’s house, there is an incline which rises at a 60ish degree angle for about 100 meters. When I’m feel­ing ambi­tious, I spend about ten min­utes run­ning as far as I can up that incline until trac­tion and grav­ity are no longer on my side, and I begin slid­ing back down. Once at the bot­tom, I rest a minute and go again. Five or six trips is enough to give my legs in that spe­cial “warm, fuzzy” feeling.

When you have mas­tered uphill sprints, you can try doing down­hill sprints. A word of cau­tion: don’t use a steep hill for down­hill sprints; you will prob­a­bly hurt your­self. For these, find a nice, smooth 15-or-so% grade. Then just run. You will find that grav­ity accel­er­ates you faster than you would nor­mally be able to run. I tend to do longer sprints down­hill because it gives me enough room to really stretch out my stride. By allow­ing grav­ity to help you over­come your “max” speed, you are actu­ally retrain­ing your ner­vous sys­tem. Just as your appar­ent “flex­i­bil­ity” is gov­erned by pro­tec­tive mech­a­nisms, the tim­ing of your mus­cle fir­ing also falls into pat­terns for increased effi­ciency. This drill can trick the ner­vous sys­tem into speed­ing up the fir­ing pat­tern for leg extension.

These three sprints are not to be ignored. You will do them, and you will learn to love them. Even if you hate run­ning as I do, you will quickly rec­og­nize that these drills are won­der­ful strength exer­cises. You won’t think of them as run­ning so much because you can keep the dis­tances very short. Just remem­ber that these are full-body intense power move­ments, so you will cer­tainly require extra recov­ery after a prac­tice in which you per­form more than a few sets of sprints. Listening to your body’s sig­nals and know­ing when to rest will keep you pro­gress­ing for longer.

Are we ever going to actually jump?

So we have finally got­ten to the jumps. I bet you were won­der­ing if we ever would. Well, you can rest assured that we have arrived. Sort of. The ini­tial jump­ing drills are still devel­op­men­tal, and we will inter­ject some power train­ing before we get into the seri­ous jumps. However, these first few jump drills will help you build coor­di­na­tion and agility that will help you use the thick mus­cles you get from heavy squats and ply­o­met­rics later on. Not to say that these drills won’t increase your strength in their own right.

Ankle Jumps

Remember, we are build­ing our jump from the foun­da­tion — ground, up. Our first jump­ing drill is going to be the ankle jump, so named because the ankle is the only joint allowed to move in this drill. Lock you knees, hold your arms by your sides, and bounce repeat­edly on the balls of the feet for as many reps in 30 sec­onds as pos­si­ble. While air­borne, pull your toes toward your shins before extend­ing the ankles again upon meet­ing the ground. Drop two or three sets of these into your warm-up.

You will find that this drill works the calves, but by rais­ing the toes on each rep, we also hit the dorsi-flexors a bit. The dorsi-flesors are the antag­o­nist to the calves. Remember what I told you about antag­o­nist mus­cles? Failure to work them will pre­vent you from get­ting max­i­mum power out of your ago­nists. Since the calves are respon­si­ble for that last push off the ground, hav­ing strong dorsi-flesxors is going to be impor­tant in devel­op­ing the jump­ing power we need.

Piston Jumps

This is another exer­cise that works agonist/antagonist pairs. In the pis­ton, you try to “jump” with­out mov­ing your head or torso. Essentially, you are going to stand in place and pump your knees up and down as fast as you can. Pull them up to your chest, and then drive your feet into the floor. This should be very fast. Try doing sets of ten rep­e­ti­tions with a good bit of rest in between.

This drill is all about speed. You may build some core strength by lift­ing the knees explo­sively, but this is more a mat­ter of train­ing the pos­te­rior chain to extend as quickly as pos­si­ble. By lift­ing the knees I the same fash­ion, you are train­ing the con­trac­tive speed nec­es­sary for back­flips and the like. Since this is a speed exer­cise, you need to do it early in the work­out to avoid train­ing the ner­vous sys­tem to work most effi­ciently at less-than-optimal speed. It’s also just damn hard to do many of these when you’re already tired.

Log Jumps

It’s usu­ally best to learn this drill by find­ing some sort of line on the floor about ten to fif­teen feet long. What you want to do is jump side to side over the line while mov­ing for­ward. Then do the same thing mov­ing back­ward. You can look at the line to start, but even­tu­ally, you want to keep your line of sight above the hori­zon. Go up and back as many times as you feel like.

A line on the floor? That’s so easy! What’s that going to do? The rea­son we start with a line is that almost every­one who tries this exer­cise over an obsta­cle of any size cheats. You can say “don’t cheat!” all day and night, but most peo­ple are going to do it any­way. Maybe it was those “I love what you do for me” Toyota com­mer­cials in the 80s, or maybe it’s from learn­ing to jump rope in grade school, but most peo­ple who try this drill will attempt their jumps by lift­ing their heels ass-ward.

This kind of jump will get you knocked on your ass in a com­bat envi­ron­ment (actu­ally, you would be lucky to land on some­thing that soft — your face is more likely). Of course we all know that cheer­leader jumps are use­less for our pur­poses, so let’s train our­selves not to do them any­more. Start this drill with a line. Focus on lift­ing at the knee, even though you don’t have to lift very far. After you groove this, tie a rope a few inches off the ground and do it again, still remem­ber­ing to jump with the knees, not the heels. If you can do this prop­erly at about knee-height, you have my per­mis­sion to find a more sub­stan­tial obstacle.

If you are near a woodsy area, you can usu­ally find a fallen tree trunk to jump over. These are great because they offer the added chal­lenge of uneven ter­rain. If you are an unfor­tu­nate city-dweller, you may be able to find a park or play­ground with some kind of balance-beam-like con­trap­tion to use (but good play­grounds are get­ting hard to find lately because they’re too “dan­ger­ous”). If you can’t find any­thing that’ll work, just use an office-sized trash can and do your jumps in place.

The impor­tant point here is that you jump from side to side and do so by lift­ing your knees. Try to spend as lit­tle time on the ground as pos­si­ble, and for the love of god, no erro­neous mini-hops between jumps. You must jump once, and only once, per side per rep­e­ti­tion. The pre-bounds will defeat a lot of the ben­e­fit of this exer­cise, so start off with some­thing small and build up gradually.

When you feel like this is in dan­ger of start­ing to get com­fort­able for you, try doing front and back jumps over obsta­cles as well. Just remem­ber to use some­thing small at first, and build up. Jumping back­wards over an obsta­cle has some psy­cho­log­i­cal imped­i­ments that may take some work to over­come, but it’ll be worth the effort to do so.

These three jump drills are pre-requisite to high-intensity power train­ing for jumps. Getting these skills will give you the coor­di­na­tion to use the power you develop with the next few exercises.

Bodyweight Strength Training

As a gen­eral rule, it’s a good idea to build strength with body­weight exer­cises before rush­ing to the weight room. I know pro ath­letes spend hours pump­ing iron every week, but we have to pre­pare our bod­ies to uti­lize these exer­cises with some lower-intensity work first. I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t be lift­ing weights, but I’m not going to tell you to do so with­out lay­ing the proper ground work first. To really reach our poten­tial jump, we are going to have to spend plenty of time in the gym, but that time is not now.

Squats

squat down as low as your flex­i­bil­ity will allow while keep­ing your feet flat on the floor. This is actu­ally very dif­fi­cult for most peo­ple. It may help you at first to hold onto some object in front of you so you can squat all the way down with­out los­ing your bal­ance. You may also have suc­cess hold­ing a ten-pound plate in front of your body as you squat. Once you have built your bal­ance and flex­i­bil­ity, you can drop the crutches and start to squat for speed.

Breathe out when you squat down and relax to allow your body to fill with air when you rise. Try to do these rapidly in sets of twenty or more. Really pump them out, breath­ing nat­u­rally as you do. Swing your arms if it feels good, but remem­ber to keep your heels down. This recruits more of the mus­cles that you will need to jump higher.

Stairs

Climbing stairs is one of the best exer­cises for jump­ing for­ward out of kamae. Stairs iso­late one leg and require a for­ward pull while push­ing up. This is exactly the motion you will use when jump­ing for­ward off of a sin­gle leg.

Practice vari­a­tions: one step, two steps, three steps, hop­ping on both legs, hop­ping on alter­nate legs, step­ping side­ways, step­ping while turn­ing, step­ping back­wards, step­ping down back­wards. Be cre­ative with your stair work, because if you don’t they can get really bor­ing really fast. For most peo­ple, I would cau­tion against the rab­bit hops up and down stairs that Bryan and I used to do, but if your knees can take it, it might not kill you to do some once every few weeks or so.

Lunges

if you don’t have a mon­strous set of uneven stairs stretch­ing halfway up a moun­tain at your dis­posal, you can still get the ben­e­fits of stair climb­ing on flat ground. Practice lunges. Keep your body upright as you step for­ward and back on alter­nat­ing legs. Push away form the ground to return to your orig­i­nal posi­tion. Also prac­tice step­ping for­ward out of the lunge, so that you end up doing a funny sort of long, deep walk.

So when do we hit the gym?

Now. To every­thing there is a sea­son, and this is weight room sea­son. This is where most jump train­ing pro­grams will have you start, but it’s near­ing the end of my arti­cle. Building strength is pretty uni­ver­sal, so I’ll let you look into some other resources for details. If you have done the devel­op­men­tal drills I’ve out­lined so far, you will have no prob­lem trans­lat­ing the strength you gain in the gym to your jump. So what fol­lows are my gen­eral rec­om­men­da­tions for jump strength work.

General Suggestions:
Use free weights, respect any weight you lift, lift the heav­i­est weights you can, find some­one to teach you the proper form of any exer­cise you do.

When you get started with any of these exer­cises, please make sure you can find some­one to help you. Experiment with var­i­ous weights. Have a good spot­ter. Ask a coach to cor­rect your form. Mistakes with heavy weights can crip­ple you. So why don’t I rec­om­mend using machines? Because they can crip­ple you too, and they don’t offer near the ben­e­fits of free weights for strength devel­op­ment (on aver­age — there are always exceptions).

Squats

The first basic weight exer­cise every­one ever learns is the squat. There is good rea­son for this, and I’m not going to waste our time try­ing to con­vince you that squats are impor­tant. Just take my word if you don’t already believe it.

You want to work up to the point that you can do sev­eral rep­e­ti­tions with a bar that weighs 1.5 times your body weight. You should be doing these slowly for now, spend­ing a few sec­onds to extend and a few sec­onds to lower the bar each time. You don’t need to squat 500 pounds, but aim for a good three-rep max of twice your weight on the bar.

Also, please squat through your full range of motion. That’s why we did the body­weight squats — to pre­pare you with the req­ui­site mobil­ity. Don’t be lured into doing half or quar­ter squats with heav­ier weight; It’s much bet­ter to squat lighter and drop all the way down.

Jump Squats

Now that you’ve built up to that impressive-looking load with all those plates on the bar, I want you to take most of them off. After you’ve built your raw strength, we need to work on explo­sive strength, and we will do this with jump squats.

Start out with an empty bar. You may want to use a pad or towel on the bar to cush­ion your shoul­ders and neck. You will begin your squat tech­nique as almost before, but this time, when you extend, drive up and through the bar. Push off the ground while exhal­ing forcefully.then bend your knees and absorb the force before slowly low­er­ing the weight to the start­ing position.

You can grad­u­ally build your weight back up as you get used to these. You won’t be able to do many rep­e­ti­tions of jump squats with much weight, but they are a great exer­cise to have in your rou­tine, even if you only do one or two sets.

Stiff-leg Deadlifts

Learn how to do stiff-leg dead­lifts, which may be the best exer­cise for devel­op­ing pos­te­rior chain power. As with the squat, find some­one to teach you how to do this exer­cise. Do it right, and you will see the rewards.

Power Snatches

Power snatches are my favorite “tra­di­tional” lift. They are a vari­a­tion on the Olympic snatch lift. Basically, you grab the bar with a wide grip, take a deep breath, and snap the bar over­head as quickly as pos­si­ble. Teaching you how to do this move­ment is beyond the scope of this arti­cle, but it is one you need to learn.

Power snatches develop explo­sive power in every mus­cle on the back side of your body. They also build the core and shoul­der sta­bi­liz­ers and con­tribute to your abil­ity to trans­late gen­eral bod­ily power into a spe­cific force pro­duc­tion. If I had to choose one weight exer­cise I could do to meet most of my needs, this would be it. It works almost every­thing in one sim­ple step, pure economy.

For most of Spring 2006, I kept a bar with about 75% of my body­weight sit­ting in my liv­ing room. Every morn­ing and every evening, I would do five sets of five rep­e­ti­tions of power snatches with about three min­utes of rest in between. I ate like a sumo wrestler and packed on mus­cle for about three months.

These weight room exer­cises will take you far in your abil­ity to gen­er­ate power. Combined with the skill and mobil­ity drills, they will give you every­thing you need for great jumps. However, it is impor­tant to seek qual­ity instruc­tion when learn­ing these moves, as they can be dan­ger­ous when per­formed incor­rectly. Keep in mind that it doesn’t really mat­ter how much you can squat — just so long as it increases over time.

Uh, Plyometrics anyone?

Finally, here they are — the depth jumps you’ve been wait­ing on me to tell you to do. Yes, you should be doing depth jumps to build your reac­tive strength and increase your jump height. However, most peo­ple rush into these high-intensity drills before their bod­ies can han­dle the fre­quency required to see good ben­e­fits. Well, if you have done most of the things I’ve men­tioned thus far, you are ready for some real ply­o­met­ric work (even though some of the other exer­cises I’ve men­tioned have had ply­o­met­ric com­po­nents, they were described in such a way as to make them work as skill exer­cises rather that reac­tive strength work).

Preparation for Depth Jumps

Before we can bound, we have to absorb. This is a ply­o­met­ric force-absorption drill. Stand one a plat­form or box. Step off. Practice land­ing as smoothly and sound­lessly as pos­si­ble. Gradually increase the height form which you step. Although it won’t seem like it at first, this drill is putting heavy strain on the large mus­cles in your legs. Rest well. After you have built up your absorp­tion over a cou­ple of weeks, you may be ready to do some depth jumps.

So here's the depth jump primer:

Stand on a raised plat­form or box, start­ing with some­thing only a few inches high. Step off. At the moment of con­tact with the ground, imme­di­ately jump as high as pos­si­ble. The goal is absolute min­i­mum con­tact time on the ground. If you try to get cute and start with a box that is too high for you, you will defeat the pur­pose of the exercise.

You can grad­u­ally increase the height of the box or plat­form, but in gen­eral, you aren’t going to get much out of any­thing much higher than your knees, and def­i­nitely noth­ing as high as your hips. Remember — don’t get cute. You will think you look very cool doing depth jumps off your bal­cony, but you will invari­ably be spend­ing too much time in con­tact with the ground to get any­thing out of the exer­cise. If you think depth jumps from an eight-inch plat­form are too easy, dou­ble your sets. It’s that simple.

There are a few advanced pro­to­cols for these exer­cises that I won’t dis­cuss here because I think that peo­ple tend to rush to the advanced ver­sions of any exer­cise you teach them, and I know I’ve cau­tioned against this sev­eral times in this arti­cle already. I hon­estly feel what I’ve writ­ten here is well beyond the needs of most Taido stu­dents. If you are look­ing for the slam dunk, more advanced ply­o­met­rics may help, but the pro­to­cols out­lined thus far are more than suf­fi­cient to get you to the point that you can jump over a chest-height kick in jissen.

Scrawny With He-Man Legs

And thus ends the leg exer­cise por­tion of our pro­gram. Of course, I’m only list­ing exer­cises here that directly impact your jump­ing abil­ity, so you have to remem­ber to work out the rest of your body as well. The above was mostly leg-work, but I’m going to include some points below for work­ing the rest of your body to add height and spring to your jump.

Don't neglect your core

Firstly, you have to have a strong core. Everyone knows this, so I’m not going to try and per­suade you.

In gen­eral, your core strength will be addressed by many of the leg exer­cises above. For exam­ple the dead­lifts and squats will give you a lot of work in your abdominal/low-back region. The mobil­ity drills will also help you here, in par­tic­u­lar the pis­ton jumps and the 4CBD. Also remem­ber that keep­ing good mobil­ity in this area is impor­tant for your over­all health.

Arms

Your arms add a lot more to your jump than most peo­ple would assume. A pow­er­ful arm swing is a vital ingre­di­ent in a high ver­ti­cal. Though in Taido, we need to try to keep our hands in a posi­tion that will allow us to pro­tect our­selves, we still need to develop this swing for devel­op­men­tal purposes.

Since the arm swing is a bal­lis­tic motion, all the curls, bench presses, and lat­eral exten­sions in the world will do lit­tle for our jumps. We need to be work­ing our arms’ abil­ity to move at high speed. Good bal­lis­tic arm exer­cises are plenty, but usu­ally involve some sort of weight, bet­ter yet, projectile.

Shot-puts are great in gen­eral, but push­ing power isn’t really what we are look­ing for here. Get a med­i­cine ball (you should really have one of these any­way). The most jump-specific med-ball exer­cise is to squat down and grab the ball with both hands between your feet. In one motion, push with your legs while throw­ing the ball as hard as pos­si­ble over and behind your head. Experiment with other variations.

You can also use dumb­bells for swings (just not indoors), and if you have access to ket­tle­bells or clubbells, you should have no prob­lem com­ing up with exer­cises that will help you develop the speed and power of your arm swing.

Control and Coordination

Being able to jump requires more than sim­ple strength and mobil­ity — it requires that you be able to get the right amount of strength mov­ing in the right direc­tion at the right time. This means agility and coor­di­na­tion. By work­ing on these, you will improve your abil­ity to con­trol your jump.

Back to Multi-Jumps

Multi-jumps are the best way to work on your jump con­trol. We did one ver­sion ear­lier with the side-to-side log jumps. You can get cre­ative now and prac­tice series of jumps while chang­ing direc­tions, turn­ing, mov­ing onto or over obsta­cles, etc. The more vari­a­tions you prac­tice, the more var­ied your prepa­ra­tion will be. Remember to include single-leg vari­a­tions too.

Eyes and Head

Your eyes and inner-ear are your guid­ance sys­tems. To develop your abil­ity to jump where you want to go, you will have to work on using them both. Practice multi-jumping drills with visual mark­ers, such as tape on the floor or cracks in the side­walk — what­ever you can find to look at while you jump. This will help you estab­lish aer­ial con­trol rel­a­tive to a visual reference.

It also helps to some­time try some “blind” work. Since this can be dan­ger­ous, I’m not going to rec­om­mend you do rab­bit hops down stairs while blind­folded, or any­thing like that. What I will sug­gest is, after build­ing your visual cues, try­ing some of the same drills as above with­out look­ing. Especially attempt to jump to an object with­out look­ing. When you land, see if you are any­where near where you thought you would be. Also try clos­ing your eyes and jump­ing with a 180-degree rota­tion. 360. 270. How accu­rately can you hit your goal?

Avoiding Over-training

As I men­tioned in a cou­ple of places above, jumps and jump-related exer­cises tend to require full-body explo­sive power gen­er­a­tion. If you do not take care to give your body plenty of recov­ery (includ­ing ample sleep and nutri­tion), you are ask­ing for an injury. Please take my advice on this. No mat­ter how seduc­tive the lure of a one-meter ver­ti­cal leap, you must train grad­u­ally and intel­li­gently. You may achieve your goals with­out tak­ing the proper pre­cau­tions, but you will pay the price for it later, I promise.

I rec­om­mend a weekly full-body mas­sage and hot baths with epsom salts twice a week to any­one work­ing seri­ously to improve their jumps. All ath­letes should also be doing reg­u­lar mobil­ity exer­cises and stretches such as those listed near the begin­ning of this arti­cle, and I rec­om­mend yoga or tai chi as a com­ple­ment to any high-intensity train­ing. This will help off­set and release resid­ual mus­cu­lar and emo­tional ten­sion from train­ing. If you take good care of your­self, you can train more and con­tinue to improve for longer.

When in doubt, sit it out. If you don’t feel it, don’t do it. If your body is recov­er­ing well, you should look for­ward to each work­out because you will be see­ing the improve­ments. If you don’t absolutely want to push your­self each ses­sion, you are not pre­pared for the work that increas­ing your capa­bil­i­ties demands. You should not be train­ing if you are fatigued, whether phys­i­cally or men­tally. While there are advanced train­ing pro­to­cols in which this state is desired, they will only work for those who have done the required plat­form build­ing. Mental tough­ness train­ing is the last step in any cycle.

Using It

If you have prac­ticed these exer­cises enough to make sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment, you will see a good deal of car­ry­over into your jump height and coor­di­na­tion. However, remem­ber that hav­ing a great jump doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean you can use it. You will have to prac­tice drills for apply­ing your jump to Taido move­ments. Work with a part­ner and get cre­ative. Start with the basics, like hien­zuki over sha­jogeri, and work up to more dif­fi­cult appli­ca­tions and aer­ial movements.

Learning to use your jump for mov­ing in all six direc­tions while exe­cut­ing Taido tech­niques will take a lot of work, but if you fol­low at least a few of the rec­om­men­da­tions in this arti­cle, you will find that you have the jump foun­da­tion to do any­thing you want to do.